How Democrats Lost Their Way on Abortion

By Margaret Carlson -
Sep 5, 2012

I hate to bring up abortion during
the Democrats’ festivities, which are going so swimmingly, but I
have a question.

Why has the party removed the sentence “Abortion should be
safe, legal, and rare” from its platform? It was in the 2004
document but not in 2008’s or this year’s. Can’t Democrats just
throw a crumb to the many millions who are pro-choice but not
pro-abortion?

Last week, Democrats feasted on the extreme positions of
Representative Todd Akin of Missouri (and vice presidential
nominee Paul Ryan, for that matter) during the Republican
National Convention. Yet Democrats have gone too far in the
other direction, threatening their hold on the great American
middle. Speaking Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Republican
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich pushed the issue, claiming,
“The president of the United States voted three times to protect
the right of doctors to kill babies who came out of an abortion
still alive” and arguing that the Democratic platform supports
“partial-birth abortion.”

Abortion is a more delicate subject than our fierce,
partisan arguments would have it. If you scroll backward, an
intimate act (a horrible one in cases of rape or incest)
occurred and a woman is pregnant. Most people outside partisan
bubbles don’t like to talk, much less scream, about such things.

Party Differences

Because the Republican base contends that a fertilized egg
has the same rights as a full, breathing human being,
Republicans are in favor of forced motherhood -- regardless of
its effects on an unwanted child. They have been promoting
“personhood” legislation across the country, essentially
dictating that the human clock starts ticking at conception.

Democrats, on the other hand, think that pregnancy is
exclusively a woman’s business. And in the first trimester, at
least, before viability kicks in, the Supreme Court’s Roe v.
Wade ruling concurs. But over the years, Roe’s legal framework
has been eroded by loopholes large enough for an eight-month-
pregnant teenager to walk through. The “health of the mother”
exception that enables abortions after viability takes into
account psychological health. What 16-year-old wouldn’t be
psychologically destabilized by an accidental pregnancy?

Polls show we are becoming a pro-life country; a slight
majority likes to call itself that even though most Americans
still support the pro-choice position in the first three months
of pregnancy. For years, Republicans have pushed legislation
designed to expose the moral quandaries inherent in abortion.
They laid traps for Democrats, coming up with a grisly name --
partial-birth abortion -- and laws requiring doctors to provide
medical care to any baby surviving a late-term abortion (Baby
Born Alive acts).

Votes by former Illinois state legislator Barack Obama --
the votes Gingrich cited on “Meet the Press” -- sound shocking
when presented without constitutional or practical context. Yet
Obama and many other Democrats have opposed a ban on partial-
birth abortion on the slim reed that its only exception is to
protect the life and health of the mother. They say the
procedure is exceedingly rare. But the health of the mother
exception is vast, encompassing age, emotional, familial and
state of mind factors broad enough to include virtually any
woman in any circumstances.

It’s a terrible thing to force a 12-year-old who lives in
chaos and hopelessness, with a boyfriend who has disappeared or
an abusive uncle who hasn’t, to have a baby. But it’s worse to
let her abort it after she waits so long for help that the only
difference between the baby being born alive or dead is a
gruesome procedure that Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said approximated “infanticide.”

Modern Miracles

Medical science is galloping ahead of Roe. When the case
was decided, we barely had sonograms and it was a miracle for a
22-week-old fetus to survive. The difference now between a
pregnancy at 12 weeks and one at 22 is life itself. Walk into
any neonatal unit and you’ll see newborns weighing 2 pounds;
they’ll be playing basketball one day.

The Christian Right was forged when Roe v. Wade was decided
in 1973. For some of its members, abortion is the only political
issue that matters. There are zealots who justify killing
doctors. Many legislators in Washington and state capitals seek
to make it impossible for a women who has been raped to get an
abortion.

Pro-choice women would be more apt to acknowledge that
Republicans have a point on some aspects of abortion policy if
they didn’t fear that Republican legislators want to send their
doctor and Todd Akin at them for an ultrasound probe. Abortion
won’t be a defining issue for Democrats this election, but the
party’s more militant posture guarantees that bipartisanship is
still a long way off. On this issue, we can’t get along. But it
wouldn’t hurt to put the word “rare” back in the platform.

(Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist. The
opinions expressed are her own.)